COLA added 46% to your benefit. How’s that working for you?
Social Security’s annual Cost Of Living Adjustment, or COLA, has boosted your monthly benefit amount by 46% since the year 2000. COLA, of course, is Social Security’s way of making your benefit payment keep pace with inflation, but unfortunately most seniors have found that annual bump to be woefully short of the inflation they’re actually experiencing. In this article by Motley Fool’s Todd Campbell, the author explores how both benefits and COLA are calculated, and how use of the CPI-W as the basis of inflation for annual COLA increase doesn’t reflect what seniors are experiencing in the real world. He goes on to suggest an alternative method using a different Consumer Price Index to compute the annual COLA, but his suggestion is only one of several alternatives being discussed in the halls of Congress.
AMAC has been at the forefront trying to strengthen Social Security by developing and proposing its Social Security Guarantee, and an alternative COLA methodology is at that proposal’s core. AMAC has been discussing and continues to discuss this common-sense solution with Congressional Representatives in its efforts to protect America’s senior citizens who rely on Social Security. To review AMAC’s Social Security Guarantee, click here.
To read Todd Campbell’s article about COLA and inflation, click here.